Josh

King's talent for writing everyday life of a small town and populating it with interesting characters is on full display here. Granted there are times he goes into the small details that may not appeal to everyone, but for me as a non-visual reader he paints a picture that even I can see.

The atmosphere he builds while slowly increasing the tension is a great journey, which I thoroughly enjoyed. There were some elements I didn't think were particularly strong such as the romance Ben has and I thought there were a tad too many ‘random' characters. Overall though it's a great “modern” take on the vampire mythos.

Quite an enjoyable book although not always the easiest to read. It can be violent, bleak, and quite dark at times although not without purpose. I wanted to point out something I appreciated from the start though, so on a bit of a tangent!

I was hooked to this book almost immediately and the reason for this is how it displays mandatory training. It reminds me a lot of basic training. Exaggerated and embellished of course, but if someone had told me Hurley had been in the military I wouldn't have batted an eye. What do I mean? Small things, for example, the mantra's about killing they yell out during bayonet training are very similar to some of the same things you will say in boot camp. The Drill Sergeant will yell things like “What makes the grass grow green” the response of course “blood, blood, bright red blood”. “Who are we?” “The Quick.” “Who are they?” “The dead”. The dead being figurative here as this was actually before Iraq or Afghanistan, but I digress. 

She even writes about that burning desire to be praised and recognized by the very people yelling at you and making you do push up's. There's enough element of truth to what Dietz is saying and experiencing during said training, that I instantly understand and have an immediate connection with the character.

Moving on though, overall I quite enjoyed the journey. I like the theme's it brings up about war, power, governance, and the power of the people. None of this is new and you can find many stories like this out there, but not every book needs to re-invent the wheel. Sometimes it's enough to add something to existing theme's and execute on it well and that's what we have here.

My biggest complaints I suppose is outside Dietz I don't have any attachments to any characters. Some people die...it's war obviously...but I don't really feel much outside of how it effects Dietz, because I don't ever feel like they're really that important. The other complaint and the main one is that the ending is kind of...well for lack of the better word lame. I would certainly have liked something a bit different in that regard, but while cliche, sometimes it is true that it's the journey and not the destination. Last bit will be in a spoiler even though not integral to the story it's something I certainly missed.

When I was reading this book I thought Dietz was male. It's never stated that they were male, they have relationships with both sexes through the story, so it begs the question why I thought that. Could write a paper on that likely, but I appreciate that the book caused that kind of reflection without it feeling unnatural or shoehorned in.

I have two major pet peeves in storytelling: instant love and telling instead of showing. Unfortunately, this book contains both, though the latter in a different form than I’m used to. To avoid spoilers, I'll use an analogy.

Imagine I tell you a story about a child who trains for years to become a master swordsman. I assure you that his training is complete, that he’s now skilled enough to compete with warriors who have spent a lifetime honing their craft. But when the moment comes to prove himself, his skill is never truly shown. He fumbles, he falters, yet I still insist he is a master. Despite never demonstrating his abilities, he somehow goes on to defeat the greatest swordsman of his time.

That’s what reading this book often feels like. The prose is strong, the plot itself is engaging, and I loved the ending, but the overall execution leaves much to be desired.

For a little context, I rated the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy very highly overall. I did this despite having complaints that I mentioned in the reviews about the characterization, the casual sexism, and the info dumps. But I still loved the series, because there are few Science Fiction authors better than Liu Cixin at taking a hypothetical or theoretical principal, inserting it into a fictional setting and building a world out of the things that aren't solvable today or that are dreamed up today.

In that trilogy the plot was so incredibly compelling and the atmosphere of fear and this heavy blanket of bleakness...I ate it up. So even though I have a lot of complaints, I gave the books a 3, 4, and 5 as I became more and more invested in this first contact story with it's incredibly interesting Scientific and imaginative idea's.

This review isn't about the trilogy, but it highlights how something very flawed can still be loved immensely. That is not the case for Ball Lightning. The same complaints exist for me (which given this was written before the trilogy isn't surprising), but the things I enjoyed in said trilogy are gone as well. There's a plot line, but not one that is very interesting,  get the same flat characters in both characterization and dialogue, even more info dumps (some points feel like a textbook), the great atmosphere from the trilogy is gone and hell there's not even an antagonist to root for or against. To me it is very much a book where the hard science fiction was given precedence over the story and the story suffers for it.

I don't like reviews to be all negative though. So what I will say is had never heard of the phenomenon Ball Lightning. So because of this book I had a fascinating time researching more about that. So I did at least get something from the novel.

Long mystery and thriller series are hard for me to stay invested in. At some point, it starts to feel like the same material is being recycled. The characters have already grown as much as they are going to, the plot becomes familiar, and the overall story starts to feel stale. For me, this book was the point where the series lost all of its momentum.

I know the characters are deep and nuanced from the earlier books, but that doesn’t come through here. They feel mostly one-dimensional. The journalism angle that added so much to the earlier novels is almost entirely absent. Lisbeth feels flat. Blomkvist’s personality barely comes through. There are also elements from Larsson’s original trilogy that seem to have been intentionally downplayed or ignored. One example is Berger’s relationship with Blomkvist. Her role had already been reduced in the previous book, but here it is virtually nonexistent until the final pages. Even then, her brief appearance seems to exist only to create conflict around her relationship with Blomkvist, potentially so it ends. That could have been fine if it were given proper attention, but instead, it is rushed and doesn’t quite fit with what we know about these characters.

In the earlier books, the first two-thirds were usually solid, but it was the final third where everything came to a head that really pulled me in. That section always made me want to keep turning pages, no matter the time or whatever else I needed to be doing. Unfortunately, that did not happen with this one. I found the story predictable, at times unbelievable, and ultimately not very engaging. Even the climax failed to hold my interest, missing the 'thrill' in thriller. Suffice to say I think this is the point I'll be stopping with this series